


David Haller Gets A Therapy Animal

by winter_hiems



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men Legacy
Genre: Autistic David Haller, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Disabled Character, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, F/M, Feelings, Intimacy, Mental Health Issues, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy, therapy animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27659668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_hiems/pseuds/winter_hiems
Summary: David’s therapist suggests getting a therapy dog.David’s not so sure.
Relationships: Ruth Aldine/David Haller
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	David Haller Gets A Therapy Animal

**Author's Note:**

> I simply think that David deserves a large fluffy therapy animal.

Life was better than it had been for a long while. David knew this, but some days, knowing didn’t help. 

Sure, he’d come a long way. He had his own place, no longer under the control of his parents – two people who he loved, but definitely didn’t trust. He had Ruth. He saw a therapist once a week, the first therapist that he’d chosen himself instead of being picked out by his parents. He was doing online university courses. For the first time in his life he had a future, or at the very least, a somewhat stable present. 

That didn’t mean that there weren’t bad days. 

Like today. Finding himself in the middle of a forest with no idea how it had happened. 

_“Okay,”_ he said to his alters, _“Fess up. Which one of you shitheads took my body for a joyride?”_

Confessions weren’t immediately forthcoming, but after some thinly veiled threats and implications about his mindscape, Non-Newtonian Annie confessed that she’d ‘wanted to go outside to look at mud’. 

Well, it could have been worse. Nobody had been hurt, partly because Annie was only violent when she felt threatened, and partly because David lived in the middle of fucking nowhere by choice. He’d learned from his time in the Himalayas that he was happiest living in a place where it could just be him and the mountainside. 

Peace. 

Nice views. 

Plenty of options for romantic walks if Ruth came over of an evening. 

He wasn’t sure which direction home lay, and Annie hadn’t been paying attention, so he grabbed onto one of his other powers (protonic cascade, which was just a fancy term for flying), and rose up above the treetops until he could see his cabin against the mountainside. Not wanting to waste time going around trees in a part of the forest that he didn’t know well, he flew in a straight-line path back home. 

*

Life was better than it had been, but that didn’t make it perfect. 

David knew that he was, and would likely remain, deeply and thoroughly traumatised. He knew that his DID would never be cured. He knew that his powers would always make life difficult, even if he did have fairly good control of them these days. 

He did what he could to manage his life, he really did. He did the therapy, he was better at looking after himself. The days of lying in bed doing nothing because he felt like he couldn’t do anything were less frequent. 

But that didn’t make him happy about the bad days. 

He mentioned this to his therapist, who paused, and said, “Have you considered getting a therapy dog?” 

“For the PTSD?” he asked. When the trauma really got to him, his instinct was to curl up in a ball as small as possible. The idea of having something to curl up with him was… actually kind of nice. 

“Not just the PTSD,” said Samirah. “You can get therapy dogs for DID as well. They can help with dissociative episodes, remind you of important daily tasks, even prop you up if you’ve just come out of a bad episode.” 

Of course, now that David had been introduced to a way of making his life easier, he was starting to realise the potential drawbacks. “It might not be safe,” he said quietly. “The number of people who come after me… mutantphobes, the X-Men, arsehole scientists who want to scan my brain. It wouldn’t be right to let a pet get caught in the crossfire of something like that.” 

“Just consider it,” Samirah replied. “I’ll email you some articles about therapy dogs and dissociative identity disorder.” 

*

David read the articles. By this stage, he knew about as much about his condition as most qualified psychiatrists, and very likely more, born from a drive in his early teenage years to learn as much about his disorder as possible. Hoping that it would make things easier. Hoping that it would make a difference. It hadn’t. 

And he couldn’t risk taking in a pet, even one that was specially trained to cope with him. He couldn’t risk that an alter would get careless and hurt it by accident, or that someone would attack him and the animal would get hurt in the crossfire. 

Daniel. Irene. Merzah. His father, on more than one occasion. David had watched too many loved ones die. He couldn’t add a dead pet to that list. 

Unless… 

Well, that certainly was an idea. 

*

By this time in his life, David had been all over the world, either because his parents had sent him to a new clinic or because someone was chasing him or because he was chasing something, and as a result he’d spent enough time in Asia to not feel completely lost. 

As he made his way through the marketplace, he sent his telepathy out, telling everyone in the vicinity that he wasn’t worth looking at. Not interesting. Nobody’s business. The Romani heritage from his maternal grandmother had given him skin a few shades darker than his father’s, but his features weren’t quite right for blending into this crowd. 

He found what he was looking for in the back streets, away from the respectable traders. 

Poachers. 

David despised them on principle, but he considered killing a last resort, so he got into their heads and knocked them out, then added a compulsion in their brains to make them feel nauseous at the idea of picking up a weapon ever again. 

With the men sleeping soundly on the ground, David turned the attention to their wares, pulling back the sheet on the back of the truck. 

“Oh,” he whispered, “You poor things.” 

They must have been beautiful when they were alive, but now a variety of exotic beasts had been reduced to bone and pelt. 

He took only what he needed. Two of each of a tooth, a bone, and a small section of pelt that he cut with an ionic blade. 

Ksenia, the alter who’d supplied the ionic blade, said, _“Why not take more? Hang a pelt on your wall?”_

“No. They aren’t trophies. I’m taking them because I need a DNA model to replicate. I won’t take more than I need.” 

*

Back at home, he took one of each piece, leaving the rest for spares, and laid them out on a bare section of floor. 

“Let’s do this, Styx.” 

Styx felt cold in his mind. _“You could use my powers to raise the dead from their graves and rule this world,”_ it hissed, _“Yet you would use them to make yourself a pet.”_

“Not a pet,” said David, “A therapy animal. To help me be more functional. You’re the one who calls me pathetic on my bad days, well, this is something that should make me less pathetic. And they’re not your powers, they’re mine. You’re just the fucking middleman.” 

Before Styx could reply, David seized the alter and got to work. 

The first thing he did involved his telekinesis; blending the DNA molecule by molecule, growing it out from the instructions coded in the genetics until a body took form. Then came the necromancy. 

David had never actually raised something from the dead before, but he’d seen Styx do it in Paris against his will. It felt cold but not uncomfortable, and by the end of it the body he’d created was sitting up, looking at him with silver eyes. An empty shell: it would do whatever he made it do. 

But he didn’t want a puppet, which was where the next part came in: giving her consciousness. He got into the meat of her brain and took a look around. Added the necessary neurological connections that would give her the equivalent training of a therapy dog. Removed her desire for food – she was undead, she didn’t need to eat. Then kicked the whole thing off with a spark. 

Instantly, there was a change in the way she stood. Before, the body had been rigid, but now she was more relaxed. She sniffed the air. 

“Hi,” he said, “I’m David. Not sure if what I did just worked, but if it didn’t then I promise to reverse the resurrection painlessly. Or… okay, I’m not sure if you feel pain. But I’ll do my best.” 

She looked at him. He deliberately didn’t move any closer to her. She definitely wouldn’t understand what had happened to her – nothing, then something. Suddenly coming into existence, her head full of information she’d never learned. But just because he’d taught her something didn’t mean that she was going to follow it, and David had no intention of forcing her. 

She took a few paces forward and rubbed her face against his knee. 

*

“David?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Is that a tiger?” 

“Uh… sort of.” 

Ruth took a few steps towards the large cat which – yeah – looked mostly like a white tiger. 

“Her name’s Leia,” David said, “I told you I was going to get a therapy animal, so I made one.” 

Leia then demonstrated her good taste by walking up to Ruth and headbutting her gently. 

Ruth smiled – stunning as usual – and scratched between Leia’s ears. Leia started purring. 

“How do you make a tiger?” 

“Well, she’s only sort of a tiger. She’s mostly tiger and snow leopard, with a bit of wolf thrown in. I took DNA samples, mixed up the genes, grew the body with reality manipulation, and then I animated it. Technically she’s undead, but all that really means is that she doesn’t need to eat or sleep. I put enough in her brain that she wouldn’t need training as a therapy animal, either. She knows what she needs to know.” 

Both of Ruth’s hands were buried in Leia’s fur. “I thought you said you weren’t going to get a therapy animal, in case they got hurt.” 

“That’s why I made her. She’s undead, so if she dies, I can just bring her back again, and she’s intimidating enough that she’d be less likely to get hurt by someone who’d want to hurt me. And she can defend herself if she has to. Much more durable than a therapy dog.” 

Ruth looked over her shoulder at him, “You know you’re adorable sometimes, right?” 

“What?” 

She laughed. “I mean it. First you won’t get a therapy animal because you don’t want an animal to get hurt because of you. Then you decide to make yourself a therapy animal who is the cutest, fluffiest thing I’ve ever seen, even though her teeth are like three inches long. And you named her after a Star Wars character.” 

David knelt down by Leia and started stroking her. Experiencing affection from more than one person for the first time in her short existence, Leia began to purr. 

“Wait so, what else do I do that’s adorable?” 

“You cuddle up to me in your sleep.” 

“Do I?” 

*

When David came back to himself, his hands started shaking. He looked around wildly; he was kneeling in the corner of the cabin’s modest kitchen. 

Had he fallen? 

There were scorched gouges in the walls and floor near him. 

What had happened? 

Who’d taken him over? Ksenia? Cyndi? One of the others? 

He felt dizzy. The sunlight coming in through the kitchen window was too harsh, too bright. 

But then Leia was there, and he leaned against her, pressed his face into her fur and closed his eyes against the light, dug his fingers into her fur and let her support his weight. 

After a time, he leaned back slightly. His hands were still shaking and the light still felt punishing, but at least he wasn’t in full crisis mode. With Leia keeping close to his heels, he stumbled into the bedroom and sat heavily down on the bed. 

“Fuck. That was a bad one.” 

Leia padded to a corner of David’s room and came back with a bottle of pills in her mouth, dropping it at his feet. 

When he picked it up – the advantage of having an undead pet mean that the bottle didn’t have any saliva on it – he saw that she’d picked up the right one. The meds weren’t heavy-duty, but they’d help his body calm itself down from the episode. 

He dry-swallowed a pill, screwed the cap back on the bottle, and set it down on his bedside table. 

David ruffled the fur on Leia’s head. Purring, she put her front paws up on his lap, politely requesting chin scratches. 

David complied. “Yeah, yeah,” he told her, “I know, you’re good at your job.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes a family is a mutant with godlike abilities, his blind seer girlfriend, and his huge undead therapy animal.
> 
> Here’s how David and Ruth sleep: David is the big spoon, Ruth is the middle spoon, and Leia is the little spoon. Sometimes David and Ruth switch positions to mix it up.
> 
> In this fic Leia performs several tasks that therapy animals will do for people with DID: she supports David in the aftermath of a dissociative episode, and get his meds for him.
> 
> Of course, you should never, ever pet someone’s therapy animal. David only lets Ruth do it because his mental state is better around Ruth, and because he trusts her. He would never let anyone else touch Leia.
> 
> David getting overwhelmed by bright light is a symptom of his autism. I think that he probably also strokes Leia as a form of stimming. (Because Leia’s undead, her fur doesn’t shed.)
> 
> I’ve noticed that curling up in a ball is something that David often does when he’s distressed.
> 
> As always, David’s alters are from comics canon.
> 
> (Maybe Leia is a bit inspired by Melog from She-Ra)
> 
> Comments and kudos are always welcome <3
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own the characters. I am not making money from this work.


End file.
